The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Computer system administrators desire to have a flexible, extensible way to rapidly create and deploy complex computer systems and data centers that include a plurality of servers, one or more load balancers, firewalls, and other network elements. One method for creating such a system is described in Aziz et al., which discloses a method and apparatus for selecting, from within a large, extensible computing framework, elements for configuring a particular computer system. Accordingly, upon demand, a virtual server farm or other data center may be created, configured and brought on-line to carry out useful work, all over a global computer network, virtually instantaneously.
Although the methods and systems disclosed in Aziz et al. are powerful and flexible, users and administrators of the extensible computing framework, and the virtual server farms that are created using it, would benefit from improved methods for deploying virtual server farms. For example, an improvement upon Aziz et al. would be a way to allocate resources from the available resources to create a virtual server farm.